Google Trends is about searches
This is about published text. More like if Google Trends counted word occurrences on webpages. Or if Google Ngrams counted webpages instead of books
People don't write much about non-newsworthy things whereas many people search "burger" anytime they want a burger delivery. The datasets aren't usable in the same way
Edit: not to say it's not a cool product! Just keep this in mind and enjoy using it :)
Someone asked an imo good question (that I was going to vouch for, idk why it was dead), but deleted it. Not sure why, but so I'll not credit the username in case they don't want that and changed some words for stylometrics avoidance
> The concept seems pretty comparable. From the title I had a good idea of what it was; when clicking on it, the visual presentation felt familiar & intuitive. \n\n Being a little less literal can be useful!
That's why I'm pointing it out: the title leads you to think they're the same metric, the page looks visually similar, and so you treat it as the same data type; but when you read the data through this lens, you draw wrong conclusions. It took me a while, scrolling down the examples, before I realised why it felt so off and that my mindset is wrong. It's what's being written about currently, not what people on HN are actually looking for
It's indeed not about being nonliteral, it's for me about having been confused about the data being shown
>Someone asked an imo good question but deleted it. Not sure why
it was me, and i deleted it because i realized my last sentence "being a little less literal can be useful" came across as unnecessarily blunt, which i didn't want. but i wasnt sure how to express what i wanted to say without it being that way. so i deleted it while rethinking my phrasing, and rethinking your comment.
in the end, i kind of came around to understand where you were coming from, so i didnt bother to recomment.
Thanks! Didn't come across like that to me though, all good
> The datasets aren't usable in the same way
I strongly disagree, especially since this tool aggregates both posts and comments. While they don't measure the exact same thing, HN posts and comments are quite similar to searches from the standpoint of "What are people interested in finding more about and discussing" - stories that get popular usually have a lot of comments, thus boosting relevant terms, while posts about topics that don't trend score low because they don't get any relevant discussion comments.
Heck, just try it yourself - I compared "blockchain" to "OpenAI" with this tool, and got a predictable result (blockchain had some spikes up until the late teens, then OpenAI took over with the launch of ChatGPT). Interestingly, the Google Trends plot for these two terms looks very similar.
Yeah I feel like hackernews trends is alright but the post title is a bit misleading, noted
maybe more like google ngram viewer? https://books.google.com/ngrams/about
Now if Algolia had a dataset of what people are searching for on HN that'd be it
Was considering that as well, but I doubt that people use Algolia in the same way that they use Google